Swann finds prescription for success
The Rio silver medallist tells Jeremy Wilson how desire for gold survived her medical degree
The length of an Olympic cycle can quite frequently take in everything from retirement and then a comeback to parenthood and perhaps trialling a new career, but rarely can an athlete have packed in a full medical degree.
For Polly Swann, a silver medallist in Rio, that dream will take another huge stride forward this weekend following the completion of her degree at the University of Edinburgh earlier this year to now rowing in her first world championship since resuming full-time training.
She will represent the British team in the women’s four after coming through the “nightmare” of juggling the demands of exams and hospital shifts with a truncated but still intense daily training programme. “When I decided to get my medical degree done, qualify as a doctor and try to come back into the team, I hadn’t really anticipated being selected for the worlds,” she says. “I thought if I was doing well I might come to the training camp. It’s gone much better than I expected.”
Swann, 31, won her silver in the women’s eights in Rio before resuming her degree only two days after arriving back from Brazil. “I had in my mind I would retire and not come back to rowing,” she says. “It was important to embrace being a student, make friends and just using my brain again, so I was quite quiet about what I had been doing. It got leaked quite quickly, which was actually nice as the other students were all really supportive.”
Swann had been a full-time rower from 2010 until 2016 and, as well as her Olympic silver, already had world and European championship golds to her name.
“Tuning back in” to studying clinical medicine and a course she had started 10 years earlier, however, was initially challenging.
“I remember my first day back on the ward and everyone was talking in three-letter acronyms,” she says. “I had to write everything down and look it up.” Like her boyfriend, Matt Langridge, who had himself won a gold in Rio, her initial intention was that she would permanently move on from full-time sport to a new career.
“It took about six months to realise I hadn’t put rowing to bed,” she says. “It was in the back of my mind a lot. I compared myself to the rest of the crew and my boyfriend.
“They were at peace with it and happy cracking on. I knew I needed to give it another try.”
The desire to win an Olympic gold, she says, “probably” played some part in the decision, although she says she “couldn’t imagine ever feeling happier” than she did on the podium at Rio with silver. The wider underlying feeling was a belief that she could still improve.
A decision was made to gradually begin combining rowing with her studies but, after initially suffering back injuries, she only began “proper” training in June 2018. The pinch point was a three-month period this year when the demands of rowing and studying became intense. “It was, go to hospital, do the tutorials, see patients, try to do well in my degree but also have a mind that I must do some training and rest and recover,” she says.
“You could be in the ward from 7.30am until 5pm, then train, study for exams and try to get enough sleep. I wasn’t in a great place. I had to be really selfish and singleminded. My physiologist and coach dealt with quite a few tears. It was something I could only have sustained for a short period.”
‘It took six months to realise I hadn’t put rowing to bed. It was in the back of my mind a lot’
But her hospital work provided perspective. “I have my health, I am very privileged and I had to occasionally remind myself of that. I also found many parallels between sport and the NHS. You have to communicate and really work as part of a team. It has definitely given me a different outlook.
“Yes, in sport, you get fatigued and want to perform but it is a self-imposed pressure. We get to do great stuff as well. We travel the world. I mean... part of our job is actually going for a nap every day. You are being paid to rest! And not many people get to try to be the best in the world at something. It’s special.”
In the longer term, she would like to work either in accident and emergency or surgery, but for now her focus is solely on rowing, amid an almost euphoric sense of disbelief that she has even got this far. “It was not that long ago I was on the phone to my boyfriend saying, ‘Why I am doing all this? I am not good enough, I’ll never make the team again’. It’s quite nice to look back now and think I was wrong. I did make the team.”